Well, not really horrible, just busy. It’s interesting that in the last year I’ve not actually even written much here, as I’ve just been too busy to even log in. In the past I was at least writting stuff, but not posting (see entries from ~Apr 2013 for more on that). Now, it’s been six months since I’ve written anything, publishworthy or not.

So, maybe it’s time for an update.

Workwise, I’m plenty happy here, but there’s alway room for improvement, of course. I’m still at Teradata, and have been for nearly two years now. The team here is small but committed, and focused, which is nice. Until about a month ago, I was *it* for linux support and virtual infrastructure (AWS and Openstack). Openstack has definitely been my focus.

Well, beginning of March we finally hired in a new guy, and I’ve been able to catch up on things that were falling behind.

My work here is getting a little flat, though. I need to either shake things up substantially, or think about moving on. Our setup is “on-the-cheap”, but I’ve always liked that in the past- doing things as cheaply as practical. Here, we’re definitely doing that, but I’m not really expanding my horizons as much as I’d like. Not enough of a probelm for me to be in any real kind of job search mode, but enough to think about it. Things cross my path that look interesting, and I’d seriously consider a decent offer. Especially anything that takes me out of the Deep South, maybe out West.

On the hobby fronts, Scouts and Photography dominate my time- flying has been sparse. In fact I haven’t been up since my last post here. Even as I type this I’m realizing how much my time has been limited.

Hopefully this will spark me to add content more frequently. I think it’s already encouraging creating more content outside of work.

I am building up a plethora of posts that are sitting in my draft folder that I will probably never actually publish. They generally fall into two categories: angry rants that are simply stream of conscious things and never intended to post, or posts that I am really trying to share some coherent thoughts and at the end I look back and think “No one would ever want to read that.” And this post probably falls into the latter category, but I’m posting it anyway, dammit.

The real crux here is like Elaine’s dilemma: is this post ….”spongeworthy”? (For the 12 of you who don’t get that…google it. I don’t even like Seinfeld, but it’s a good reference.) I write stuff that is highly technical and would interest NOBODY, or fluff that I’m embarrassed to have published. I’ve got some short stories and things I’ve written that I’ve considered putting up here, too. But, again, it seems to be stuff I’ll hate six months from now.

I really need some good content, though, if this is going to be anything more than a personal diary- ‘more than a tweet, less than a livejournal’ entry doesn’t cut it.

I finally got around to paying more attention to my blog. Updating the resume…adding a post or two…proofreading others to make corrections…looking into some new plugins for WordPress….etc.

One of the most annoying things to deal with was the comment spam. In three months I had accumulated 15,000 pieces of it. There’s only about 2,000 people who have actually visited my blog thus far. Ever. (Thanks, Google Analytics!) But, since I’m really not on here all that often (something I’m trying to improve on…) I really hadn’t paid attention to the spam. I have all comments require moderation, so they weren’t flooding my site- I just have to go on every couple of months, glance through the posted commented on to see if there are any real comments (there aren’t) and run a SQL command to manually clear the crap.

I would like to know if there are any actual comments in the future, and see if anyone has anything useful to say, or even a useless comment, but one that was made by an actual person instead of a bot quoting random sentences from random books in an attempt to look Turing-complete. Thus, I configured Akismet this evening, and it’s already flagged crap as spam and shuffled it off to the spam folder, which is much easier to empty- no SQL commands into the void.

So long story short, and I’m sure old news to the vast majority of bloggers, Akismet makes me smile just a little more than I was yesterday. Thanks, devs!